Kalpa Imperial (13 page)

The Battle of the North lasted exactly fifty hours. The men attacked, broke, scattered, retreated, had a bite to eat, and returned to the attack. Telling such things one is sickened by what men are. They were not men; nor were they wolves, nor hyenas, nor vultures, nor eagles. They were blind organisms, mindless, nerveless, without feeling or thought, with only the power to wound, and blood to shed. They didn’t think, believe, feel, see, or hope; all they did was kill and kill again; all they did was retreat and retreat again, and attack again, and kill again. They had been born, they had worked, loved, played, grown to manhood for nothing but this, to kill in the fields of the North under the walls of a mossy, flowery city. Fifty hours after the first attack not more than a hundred men were still afoot, naked, dirty, bloody, maimed, mad. They didn’t know or care who the enemy was: they went on killing, attacking, shouting with their lacerated mouths, weeping from their wounded eyes, breathing through their split nostrils, holding their weapons with what fingers they had left, returning to attack, to kill. It was then that Oddembar’Seil cut off a head that rolled on the blood-soaked ground, and on the headless body, on the filthy, hacked breastplate, flashed a collar of gold and amethysts. The future emperor shouted again, and so ended the Battle of the North: he had killed Reggnevon son of Reggnevavaun, pretender to the imperial throne.

You know how the inhabitants of the northern city and his few surviving soldiers crowned the Emperor Oddembar’Seil the Bloodthirsty on the site of his victory as he stood erect over the body of his enemy, dirty, wounded, feverish, naked, with a marble crown hacked with hammer and chisel from the head of a statue that adorned an old aristocratic garden now used for playing-fields, and how then and there he signed his first decree, declaring the city that had witnessed his triumph the capital of the Empire.

Six thousand days hadn’t passed, not yet. But the war was over, and when that time really had gone by, the northern city was still capital of the Empire; and the courtiers, the functionaries, the ladies, the admirals, the judges, went to and fro by the Fountain of the Five Rivers, under the arch on which stand the mourning figures from the first mayor’s tomb, through the winding, narrow streets, and sometimes stopped to drink or to wet their fingers and forehead in the alabaster basins that still ran with healing water. For the emperor had ordered that they be preserved: he never forgot that the citizens had offered him food and shelter, and he believed that this had brought him luck. He commanded that his palace be built using the walls of the Empress Sesdimillia’s palace, keeping its style and plan, antiquated as they were, and he prohibited any change in the streets and buildings, the parks and fountains. The outside of houses could be repaired and painted, but not changed; the incredible staircases could not be moved; the inopportune walls could not be taken down. Building could take place outside the city limits, and did, and interiors could be remodeled, and many were, so that houses could return to what they’d been in the reign of the Listener and his heirs. And nothing more.

The six thousand days of the Emperor Oddembar’Seil the Bloodthirsty were fulfilled, and another six thousand days passed, and a bit more. His rule was harsh and violent; he was implacable with his enemies and soft with his friends. But it must be said for him that he reorganized the Empire and brought it peace, territory, and unity. He did so brutally, with more blood, more deaths, with woe and mourning, but Reggnevaun would have been no more merciful, nor can we know what might have happened if the Six Thousand Day War hadn’t been fought. A stroke finished him in the midst of a banquet, and the tears shed for him were few and false.

Many years have passed and many emperors have lived and reigned, but the mountain city is still the capital of the Empire. Toadies and social climbers invent poetical names and illustrious origins for it, and Drauwdo the Brawny is a mere character in bedtime tales for children who don’t want to go to sleep yet, but the Bloodthirsty was perhaps the first who understood it, and made his understanding clear when he ordered that it not be touched or changed. And those who came after him must have guessed the profound wisdom in this order, which seemed so little in accord with the spirit of the times, since they too enforced it. Here it stands, as in the years of the healing waters, of the gods, of the musicians, of the battles. It looked like a dense mesh of gold, with tiny, irregular openings, pulled tight, stretched across the mountains. It’s grown on the farther side, of course, and seven more roads have been added to the one that ran to it; all eight are wide and well-paved as royal roads should be, and swarm with travelers and traffic. It turned its back on the plain that was a desert, a garden, a battlefield; the new mansions, the rich houses, the palaces of the nobility, are to the north, on the road that leads to the distant port. It shines at night, and the light on the peaks never goes out, only dimming in the dawn, as when the painters and poets used to talk and drink in the cafes. It prospers and thrives as it did when the healing water welled up out of the ground. It’s a splendid capital, beautiful, mysterious, charming, old as the capital of an old Empire should be, solid, wealthy, built to last thousands and thousands of years. And yet I wonder. . . .

Book Two: The Greatest Empire

Portrait of the Empress

Yes, said the storyteller, I knew the Great Empress, and having known her, I can tell you that of all of the people who praise her, weep for her, write about her life and deeds, make up songs about her, not one of them does her justice. And probably they never will, because she was greater than any poem or elegy or chapter in a history book. She wasn’t young or beautiful or learned; she wasn’t good-natured; she was rude, harsh, and pigheaded. But I know what made her great. It was the wisdom that lies in seeing things in a different way and using knowledge in a different way. It’s not something anybody ever taught her. Abderjhalda didn’t get her education in palace schoolrooms or exclusive colleges for children of the nobility, but in the streets. And when I say streets I mean miserable hovels, crowded holes, tenements, I mean little shops with filthy windows and furtive customers, cafés where no sensible person would ask for a glass of water, lousy hotels with people crammed into the rooms, where if you dug around in the basement you’d probably turn up a corpse or two that happened to have had its throat cut. There she was born, there she grew up, there she got her education, in what may be the best school of government. Notice I say government, not power. Power, bah! she’d say, looking disillusioned. Only if you forget about power can you govern well, she’d say. And it was true. She forgot about the power she had, which was immense, and so power, ignored and disdained, courted her, trotted after her, like a prostitute fawning on a good-looking wealthy man. But she despised it utterly and made it wait like a beggar at the palace gates. Anybody could approach her, anybody could come into the palace and talk to her, for not depending on power, she had no fear, and dispensed with protocol and ceremony. She was the first person on the imperial throne for centuries and centuries who kept no bodyguards, the first to go down into the streets unprotected, without armed men surrounding her, carried in a sedan chair like any rich woman, or on foot like any workman’s or tradesman’s wife. So it was that I knew her.

I was a very young man then, scarcely more than a boy, and I was just beginning to tell stories in the squares and streetcorners of the capital. Nobody knew me, nobody had offered me so much as a booth in the outskirts of the city where I could tell my stories. I had no visions of the future, I wasn’t aspiring to be where I am now, sitting on cushions on carpets on a marble floor, gazing at stained-glass windows, drapes and crystal lamps while I recall my tale. I wasn’t greeted with the bows and murmurs that meet me now when I enter the Great Tent. I told stories in the streets, that was all. Every day, to be sure, more people gathered round to hear me, and the more people there were the better I spoke, the happier and surer of myself I felt, the more colors, scenes, characters, landscapes, and battles filled my tales. And next day there were more people, and the day after still more, and when the police finally got around to objecting because people couldn’t get through the streets where I was telling my stories, I had to move to Northern Domains Square, and soon after to the Market Place. I was still three years short of twenty when one day a coach stopped alongside the square. I didn’t notice it. I was already used to officials, officers, great ladies, whole families arriving in coaches to join the circle sitting around me. A woman got out. I didn’t even look at her, but went on speaking. I was telling the history, the true history, not the fabrication that got made up later, of the Curse of Ervolgerd IV, that emperor of the Vlajanis dynasty who after his death protected his friends and took atrocious vengeance on his enemies, driving his assassin mad and forcing him to mutilate himself at the palace gates under the horrified eyes of the crowd drawn there by his delirious screams. I was describing the first public appearance of the dead emperor when the woman sat down among the people listening to me and listened to me with them. It was a cold day, a cutting wind blowing down from the north, the sky grey. People had brought braziers to the Market Place and heated pots of chocolate on the coals, or spiced wine, or thick soup. Some of them had cloaks, others held their heads down and hid their hands in their sleeves. Somebody offered the woman a steaming cup and she said thanks and drank it. And for several hours, until I finished my tale, saying: And Ervolgerd the Corpse never returned again to walk among the living, she and a wrinkled old woman and her grandson, who’d both been there since the start of the story, shared a tattered cloak that had been washed so often it was threadbare. I ate the food the audience offered me, took the money they gave me, and stayed a while listening to what people had to say about what they’d heard, for I was young then, weak, the fruits of vanity still tempted me. Finally I got up, stamped on the ground to warm up and get the pins and needles out of my feet, and left. Three streets away, the coach caught up with me. The coachman told me to get in. I said no, of course. A storyteller knows from the start the risks he runs, and if he’s a real storyteller he avoids them with care, using violence if he has to. I carried no weapon, I never had one and have never needed one; I just said no and went on walking. The woman who’d been in my audience wrapped up in an old cloak with an old woman and her grandson leaned out the coach window: “Come on, you stupid kid!” she shouted. “The empress orders you to obey!”

I’d never seen the Great Empress. How could I have? I lived in a humble house in a humble district, like most people of my profession I had few friends and those few were as poor and obscure as I was, and obviously storytellers don’t enter the imperial palace. If one of them does he isn’t a storyteller, he’s a poet. And yet I entered the imperial palace. I wasn’t a poet, I’m not a poet, I never will be, yet I entered the imperial palace. I’d never seen the Great Empress, never heard her speak, didn’t know her face, but the instant I heard her shout at me I knew it was her, and if they’d tortured me to make me deny it, I couldn’t have, I would have gone on saying, yes, that’s her!

The coach had stopped. I got in and sat down beside her. She asked my name and how old I was, and I told her. She didn’t ask or say anything else till we arrived at the palace about an hour later. At first I was afraid. This is the great lady who rules the hugest empire ever known—what does she want with me? Does she want to kill me? Lock me up in a cell? Kidnap me? Make me her gigolo? Turn me into a servant, a eunuch, an ass-licking courtier? Of course I was afraid, but she was so quiet and natural, taking everything so easy, the grey day, me sitting by her, the bumping and swaying of the coach, that my fear wore off and in fact I got rather sleepy.

“You’re going to sit here and you’re going to tell me the lives of all the emperors who preceded me,” she said.

“What?”

“You heard me, you aren’t deaf.”

“Your Imperial Majesty is crazy,” I said.

She burst out laughing. She put her hands on her hips and laughed like a washerwoman.

We were in a palace room that looked out onto a palace garden. There was a fireplace with a fire burning in it and carpets and a piece of gilt furniture with a round mirror in the middle and flowers all over the place and a gaudy parrot swinging on a ring hung from the ceiling.

“All right,” she said, “what’s this about me being crazy?”

“I hope Your Imperial Majesty will find it possible to pardon me,” I said, “but if Your Imperial Majesty thinks one life is long enough to recount the deeds of the rulers of the Empire, it means Your Imperial Majesty doesn’t know anything about history, or is crazy, or both.”

She sat down in a very high-backed, straight chair. “I’m going to tell you three things,” she said. “First, I couldn’t be more sane. Second, I really don’t know anything about the history of the Empire, or a lot of other things. And third, if you say Your Imperial Majesty one more time I’m going to knock you into the middle of that garden.”

From then on I called her ma’am, since that’s what she liked to be called, like the ancient empresses of the heroic times or the fragile secret women of the dynasties of the third Middle Empire. Every day, for years, I sat down in that same room at nightfall, and told the empress all I knew, all I could, about the emperors and the empire. I made two conditions, one of them silly, the other serious: that she’d have that malevolent and presumptuous bird removed, and that nobody should know I came to the imperial palace. It didn’t matter about the parrot, it may have tickled her, or was of no importance to her. But she wanted to know why I wanted my visits to the palace kept secret. I had to explain to her that a storyteller is something more than a man who recounts things for the pleasure and instruction of the crowd. I had to tell her that a storyteller obeys certain rules and accepts certain ways of living that aren’t laid out in any treatise but that are as important or more important than the words he uses to make his sentences. And I told her that no storyteller ever bows down to power, and I would not. If she, the empress, knew nothing about the empire, I could teach her, and it was my duty to do so, serving not the throne but the people who upheld the throne; but nobody else should know about it, because although I didn’t need to make any profit from what I was doing there, still I didn’t want people saying that I hadn’t been paid anything, not a coin or a shoebuckle or a grain of rice, for the same stories I told in the streets and squares. Other people, I told her, officials, captains, bureaucrats, servants, can enter the palace without risk, because they have nothing to lose. And a poet can, if he’s the real thing, because being beyond power he can’t lose. But a storyteller is no more than a free man, and being a free man is a dangerous business. I told her this, and she understood. She never said a word about my presence there, and I never met anybody on my way to and from the side door that led to the room that looked out on the garden. There she’d be waiting for me, and there she’d listen to me, attentive, very rarely asking me a question or two.

Through the years she had left to live, which were many, though not enough, I spoke to her of the Empire, and I’m happy to say that she understood the meaning of what I told her and knew the difference between models to imitate, adapting them to the times, and examples to reject or forget or avoid with care. I began with the obscure eras of the Divided States, from which no chronicles or even names remain. I went on to the Chiefs, to the Lords, to the Little Kingdoms, mentioning here and there a warrior, a battle, a
coup d’etat,
a conquest. And after a few months I got to the first emperor, the one who called himself the Emperor Without Empire, who built a palace in the middle of a desert, had a huge gold throne made, sat down on it, and said: I am the emperor. I told her that on that day the Empire was born. And I told her about the dynasty that followed, the first, during which the Empire began to grow and find its strength. By the time I got to the Kao’dao, those rageful and visionary emperors who made the first code of law and moved the throne from the desert to the cities, two years had passed, and I was no longer telling my stories outdoors in the squares, in rain or cold or heat or snow. I told them in a pavilion of silk and wood at the end of an avenue of sycamores that no longer exists, a pavilion constructed especially for me by the Tea-Shredders Guild. But I didn’t talk about such matters to the Great Empress, and though she saw I had better clothes and shoes now, she asked me nothing. She went on listening. And now and then she’d speak about herself, when I’d finished with the mad kings, or the wise ones, or the sick or saintly or warlike or ambitious ones, for every kind of man or woman has managed to fit their buttocks onto the imperial throne.

“Yes,” the empress said, “new blood’s always needed, wherever and whenever, on the throne. More than ever in these times. But of course no such disinterested thought inspired my wish to climb up here and sit on the golden seat. To tell you the truth, I took my first step in this direction so that old Dudu could have somewhere to die. I didn’t want him dying in the street, where the sweepers would find his body in the gutter and dump it in the ditch along with spoiled food and dead cats and bits and scraps of stuff even beggars can’t use. I wanted him to die in a bed with a blanket over him and his head on a pillow. I wanted him buried in a hole dug in the earth and covered over, and then a stone put there, with his name, which wasn’t Dudu but something a lot more complicated. But of course I haven’t even told you who he was. He’s worth remembering because it’s worth remembering everything you meet in life, just for its own sake. He called himself a juggler, but fumbling with plates and balls and worn-out hats in a dump where they sell bad liquor doesn’t make a man a juggler. He was a fat, lazy, lascivious old drunk, and that’s the best I can say about him. When the waters of the Great Flood began lapping at the mud and wattle huts on the edge of town, the woman who maybe was my mother told me to stay put, keep still, be quiet, and she’d try to get out and come back to get me. I didn’t believe her, I didn’t have any reason to believe her, but I kept still and quiet because at ten years old I’d already learned quite a lot. Only after hours had gone by I started crying because I was cold and scared. Plop, clop, plop, clop went old Dudu’s cartwheels in the water that had started rushing down the alley. But I howled louder than the water and the wheels, and the plop, clop halted, and the old man pulled away the boards that closed the doorway and said, ‘Aha, a kid!’ He took me up into his little wagon, he handed me the traces and told me to drive. I cried and drove and the old man went ahead singing—

Ladies and gentlemen, here’s the rain,

it breeds weasels and toads,

the old whore, the rain,

it gets into your bones

and rots out your braaaaaain!